Observations: Why drawing a steemit logo isn't proof of authenticity.

This one is going to be a bit funny, in a sad way.

The Situation:

It's now a little over a week ago that I had posted about a rather ridiculous case of impersonation.

The accounts of @ravenrillay and @rashidminhas were putting on quite the show, almost too absurd to be taken serious, built on sockpuppet accounts, plagiarized content and false identities.

Since then, or so the story goes, someone told the real Rashid Minhas what happened, and he himself decided to sign up for steemit. He even made sure to give us full proof and went to lengths to verified himself in a DTube video!

Now isn't that great news for once?

Well no, unfortunately not.

My Observations:

I'll tell this story exactly how it unfolded itself to me.

It all started just a few hours ago.

"Ding-Dong"

A sound that has already become all too familiar. I hear it several times throughout the day whenever another concerned steemian opens a new conversation with me on steemit.chat.

So what is it this time? Something interesting maybe? No, it appears to be just another referral link post, nothing special or alarming, actually something that I myself don't have much of an opinion about at all. I kindly pointed the messenger towards the #steemcleaners-public channel for that he may discuss his concerns further over there.

I continued minding my own business, filing old leads, classifying new ones and checking for something to reveal itself from within my open files. The usual detective work.

A few uneventful hours passed.

"Bleep!"

The concerned steemian from earlier was back. This time he notified me about a proper serious spammer, @tijnski. That account had been posting the exact same pointless post over and over for three weeks already, nice catch! Albeit, yet again, nothing that looked like it needed any further investigations by myself.

But, before I would just send this onwards to the @steemcleaners again, who was this zealous steemian, so busy blowing the whistle today?

I was quite surprised to see:

@uzairalone was the real Rashid Minhas

He had the legacy facebook profile to prove it, and he even uploaded a verification video to DTube!

I'll be honest, I felt quite flattered at first.

Did my recent post really miraculously end up in the hands of the actual victim? Remember, I wasn't able to locate Rashid's facebook account back then and didn't notify him myself.

In Rashid's introduction post, he said that someone had sent him a WhatsApp message about the whole situation, and that had brought him here. Yes, that might actually be possible. After all, despite not finding his facebook profile, I was at least able to identify his identity and show a link to the "real" Rashid Minhas' business listing in my post.

A sense of pride and awe struck me.

But, the moment didn't last.

It's all a bit too good to be true isn't it?

When you talk to scammers a lot, you develop a certain kind of cynical skepticism.

What caught my eye immediatly, @uzairalone should be a complete steemit beginner, yet he's already posting his verification straight to DTube and uses the full set of voting-bot support by randowhale, minnowbooster, discordia, minnowsupport, minnowpond, nettybot, more than I could have named from the top of my head. Somebody must be a quick learner here, he's a mind-reader after all, right?

But a brief look into @uzairalone's account history on steemd.com gave it away instantly. First, this account is a day older than my original post unmasking the "imposter", next, look at this:

@uzairalone originally labelled himself to be a "photographer graphic designer traveler" accompanied by a profile picture showing a boy with a camera. His first two comments, before even making a post of his own, were already upvoted by none other than the infamous duo @ravenrillay and @rashidminhas.

He then suddenly changed his profile information to reflect the mind-reader Rashid Minhas we already know. You might have guessed it already, in the meantime I had posted my Cookie Crumbs unmasking his previous self.

What was he thinking?

I have absolutely no Idea!

I tried to play along for a while and continued chatting with @uzairalone.

After I expressed my "joy" over the situation, Rashid thanked me several times for catching his imposter and soon enough asked me to verify his identity for the greater public.

It was time to confront Rashid with his own idiocy. He tried making some excuses and twisted the story for a while, but when I showed him exactly what I had gathered so easily in his account history, he only said:

I must say, I've not had many chances to get a good laugh in my occupation here so far, but here it was.

After this he asked me to give him another chance. He even had the audacity to ask me to write a post for him so he could then share it. Yeah, I have no idea how that's supposed to work like.

In a way I feel sorry for this guy, something is clearly not right with him, but I don't think we need to be nice to pathological liars here.

The Conclusion

A verification just doesn't tell the whole story.

You can draw steemit logos next to your username as many times as you want. If your account tells a different story than you, something probably isn't right.

yours,
Sherlock

P.S.: By the way, the spammer @tijnski, correctly identified by @uzairalone, could still need some flags, too!

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Actions speak louder than verifications and the blockchain does not twist facts.

Just because a person is real, it does not make them genuine!